Re: A Pet Peeve about posting on the lists
Mark Brown wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jul 23, 1999 at 12:43:37AM +0000, Lee Elliott wrote:
>
> > Sorry to have peeved you, I do this deliberately so that paragraphs format OK regardless of window size (I'm only able to check this on YAM & Outlook) - for me, reading:
>
> Don't do that! The standard line length is 80 columns, and all sane
> mail clients can display that without problems. Most Unix mail clients
> do *not* do word wrapping in either display mode (spacing may be
> signifigant) or when editing replies (there's no way to tell if you
> really did intend to write a 1000 column line or if you just didn't put
> in any line breaks, making line-mode operations useless when editing
> unless the message is re-formatted and requoted).
>
> This makes your messages very hard to read (especially if the window is
> actually wider than 80 columns - 80 columns is actually a pretty good line
> length for displaying block text), and means that when people reply to you
> your message will be improperly quoted (one mark at the start of the
> paragraph) and often won't have context snipped properly.
>
The issue here is using "quoted-printable", which is what Lee was doing,
and which I used to do before I learned how people hate it. It actually
looks very nice indeed in a GUI mail reader like Netscape or (I assume)
YAM, wrapping to the window size.
The currently accepted method (hard line breaks at a certain column) can
break down if you have enough nested levels of quotes.
Only HTML (among formats that some readers can handle) really handles
nested quotes well, IMHO. It's got a tag just for it. Do any
text-based readers handle HTML (by spawning Lynx or something)? Just
curious; I wouldn't *dare* post HTML here. ;-)
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